High Water Levels Are Wreaking Havoc In The Great Lakes, Swamping Communities

Rita Alton has an unusual morning routine these days: Wake up. Get dressed. Go outside to see if her house is closer to tumbling down an 80-foot cliff into Lake Michigan.

When her father built the 1,000-square-foot, brick bungalow in the early 1950s near Manistee, Michigan, more than an acre of land lay between it and the drop-off overlooking the giant freshwater sea.

But erosion has accelerated dramatically as the lake approaches its highest levels in recorded history, hurling powerful waves into the mostly clay bluff.

Now, the jagged clifftop is about eight feet from Alton’s back deck. "It’s never been like this, never," she said on a recent morning, peering down the snow-dusted hillside as bitter gusts churned surf along the shoreline below. "The destruction is just incredible."

On New Year’s Eve, an unoccupied cottage near Muskegon, Michigan, plunged from an embankment to the water’s edge. Another down the coast was dismantled a month earlier to prevent the same fate.